He's already set off one computer storage revolution. Now Stuart Parkin is reengineering RAM so we'll never have to boot up again.

By David Voss

Stuart Parkin is not a guy who needs caffeine. By the time I meet him for
morning coffee inside IBM's Almaden Research Center, a tidy row of four
steel-and-glass shoeboxes secluded in the foothills above San Jose, California,
Parkin's already been up for hours, bouncing around his lab. We go down
one floor to his office, with Parkin leaping stairs two at a time, as if
mere walking holds him back. He's loudly humming some kind of double-time
march. Everyone who meets Parkin notes his affinity for humming, a kind
of continual soundtrack to the operation of his mind.

For the past decade, the 44-year-old British-born physicist has been Big
Blue's chief innovator for magnetic storage research. In the early 1990s,
Parkin developed a new type of read/write device for hard drives known as
a giant magnetoresistive, or GMR, head.
Now a component in every PC's hard drive, GMR heads have dramatically improved
the reliability of data storage by helping to stabilize smaller magnetic
bits, which had a tendency to unexpectedly flip polarity or vanish altogether.

In recent years, Parkin has shifted emphasis from static hard drive storage
devices to dynamic memory technologies and is currently developing an
innovative
chip called MRAM. Based on a tiny, checkered grid of magnetized switches,
magnetic random-access memory will eventually replace dynamic random-access
memory (DRAM), the ubiquitous workhorse in almost all the 320 million PCs
currently in use.

The crucial difference between MRAM and DRAM is that Parkin's chip operates
without electricity, relying on magnetic polarity to store data. This
distinction
has important consequences for, among other things, a computer's boot-up
time, which may explain why Parkin is in a hurry. He's on his way to delivering
something that's very high on the wish list of PC users everywhere:
"instant-on" computers.

Brought to Almaden in the early '80s, Parkin used a sputtering vacuum cylinder to create a technology now employed by the entire disk-drive industry.

Parkin walks me through MRAM basics, starting with a refresher course on
DRAM. The bits in DRAM, he says, are nothing more than clumps of stored
electrical charge. Hundreds of times every second,
a bracing pulse of electricity is required to refresh the DRAM capacitors,
or any data on the chip will be lost. "This charge continually leaks, or
evaporates, from the capacitors," he says, "so power must be consumed to
repeatedly refresh the memory."

A typical DRAM-based machine stores the operating systemand applications
on the hard drive. As your computer slowly comes to life - a process that
can take several tedious minutes - a working copy of the OS, as well as
any programs you've tagged to launch at startup, are loaded from the hard
drive into DRAM, where a microprocessor can get to them quickly. If your
computer crashes or freezes, any data stored in DRAM is lost and you're
forced to sit through another lengthy boot session.

Replace DRAM with MRAM, and your computer would work like other electronic
devices: Flip the power switch on, and the machine is up and running
immediately.
When you switch off your PC, an MRAM chip would retain anything loaded
on it, such as the OS and apps.

MRAM is a type ofnonvolatile memory, which means the chip is based on
a solid-state design (no moving parts), and data on the chip doesn't have
to be periodically refreshed. Another example of nonvolatile memory is
flash memory, used in devices like MP3 audio players and digital cameras.

Why not use flash memory to make an instant-on PC? Because there's a hitch:
Flash memory cells get damaged each
time they write a bit. After about 10,000 read/write cycles, they crap
out. Thus, flash will prevail in consumer electronics, but its lack of
long-term reliability makes it a poor choice for desktop memory.

"The holy grail in memory chips is something that is nonvolatile, consumes
low power, and is cheap," says Jim Handy, semiconductor memory analyst
with Dataquest. "But we just haven't been able to find a fusion of all
those attributes. The nonvolatile memories we have now are slow as molasses."
Handy says DRAM is vulnerable to any technology with "the right attributes
of price and speed."

Parkin has already built prototype MRAM chips that store about 1 Kbyte
of data. That's not much, but he's confident he can ramp up memory capacity
in the next few years and produce a chip that is smaller and faster, stores
more data, and costs less to manufacture than DRAM. Parkin won't say exactly
how long it will take IBM to do this, but analysts outside the company
believe it will happen in less than five years.

To wholly supersede the present memory standard in a mere half-decade may
sound wildly optimistic. The worldwide DRAM market was $21 billion in 1999,
reports Dataquest. By year-end 2000, it's forecast to increase 44 percent
to $30 billion, with annual revenues growing steadily at 40 percent through
2002. But several big names behind commercial R&D labs - including Motorola
and Honeywell - are sure a big change is coming, and are funding MRAM projects.
Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Siemens, and Bosch are also experimenting
with MRAM - all of them determined to leap ahead of IBM and capture the
potentially huge profits if millions of computer owners race to upgrade
their PCs to instant-on machines.

I ask Parkin how, with all the competition, IBM can capture the MRAM market.
"We have 10 to 15 patents that relate to MRAM," he tells me. "Two are very
important: one for the magnetic memory cell itself, and another relating
to the chip's architecture. We've also been very successful in moving
leading-edge
materials into mainstream products, including GMR in disk drives, and copper
interconnect wiring for chips."

Parkin was born in Watford, England, but his father's marketing business
kept the family on the move - first to Bowden, near Manchester, then to
Scotland. As a teenager, Parkin says he turned inward, describing himself
as a recluse,a bookish, overachieving youth with a natural curiosity for
science. Cambridge was the obvious choice for college, recalls Parkin,
because of its strong reputation in physics. He earned his PhD in 1981
while doing research at the university's Cavendish Laboratory, where J.
J. Thomson discovered the electron a century ago. After Cambridge, Parkin
went to France for a year of postdoc work in superconductors at the
Université de Paris Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Orsay.
In 1982, he joined IBM's San Jose facility, which was about to refocus
R&D attention on magnetic physics - Parkin's specialty.

David Voss (dvoss@nasw.org) , a science writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland, is a former senior editor ofScience.